THE BATTLE OF WHO COULD CARE LESS

Ladies eeend gentlemen, it's now time for the evening's most HOT-ly anticipated event, the battle of who could care less. And lummy, do we have a fight for you! Iiiiiinnnn thhhhhhhhee BLUUUUUUE corner: it's the beardy enigma himself, Romaaaaaan... Aaaaaaa... Bramovich! Eeeeend in the red blue, definitely BLUE, bluer than a late-night text: the man they call the Fat Spanish Waiter, Rafa! Ben! Itez! The contestants will take it eeen turns to demonstrate how little they care about the opinion of Chelsea fans. The last man standing will in fact be sitting down, pulling on an Embassy No1 and finishing the crossword. [Furious fist waving from the crowd - fortunately they don't have to keep hold of the £50 they were relieved of on the way in, and are free to thrash away, righteously.]

Gentlemen, begin!

Roman looks up and notices the announcer for the first time. His left eyebrow almost moves.

"I have been here in England for eight years and have heard a lot of things," Rafa chirrups, cheerily filing "Eff off Benitez" somewhere between "Rafa la bamba" and the sweet peal of the bells at Liverpool cathedral. Ah, Liverpool.

Roman lifts his nose just away from his coat collar, and sniffs through one nostril.

Rafa swings his Hush Puppies up on to the desk and clasps his hands behind his head. "The good thing is I don't understand what people were singing!" he Idon'tspeakatheInglishsogoods, as the cleaner pushes his size nines off the mahogany. He did ask the Interim Manager to move his feet, but the silly beggar didn't catch a word of it. Not a syllable!

"Is it me, or does that cloud look a bit like Bruce Forsyth?' Roman wonders. "The sky is blue."

"I was asking: 'What are they saying?'" titters Rafa. He's accidentally become quite animated, but only because it's funny how bad his hearing is, you see. "But I don't care. I'm just focused on the game."

In a minute, Roman might pull his hand out of his pocket and rub his beard.

"How many people do you need to write a banner?" asks Rafa, before shrugging and pursing his lips. He didn't notice them, obviously, but someone might have mentioned something about banners, maybe, on the way to the car. Anyway, a moment's calculation is all he'll waste on this poser, ref. "Just one."

Pockets are warm, though.

"If we start winning games, the fans will come on board and they will see I'm trying to do my best," says Rafa, though he doesn't care if they're on board or not because he can't understand what they're saying, anyway, these west Londoners with their hard Ks. "Some of the fans will realise that is not the way to support their team," he adds, though of course he doesn't really know how they were supporting their team on Sunday because he doesn't understand them and he wasn't listening because he's very focused on the team and also he, like, totally wouldn't care even if he had been because he's just doing his best with the team.

QUOTE OF THE DAY I

"During the 46 games in the Championship last season, West Ham United had zero arrests for racism or violence, so while we are surprised to see such reports today, we will examine any available evidence of such conduct thoroughly and take the appropriate action" - West Ham give themselves a hearty clap on the back for the wonderful behaviour of their fans in a statement promising to take the "strongest possible action" against any of the "small number of supporters" found to have been chanting support for Lazio, singing songs about Hitler or mimicking the sound of gas chambers during their team's defeat at White Hart Lane yesterday.

QUOTE OF THE DAY II

"I would like to apologise. The use of the word was not intended to cause offence and was used in the heat of the moment. It was a poor choice of language to define those emotions and wasn't meant in the true meaning of the word" - Firewall FC manager Brian Laws issues an apology for likening his team's defending to the holocaust in an interview with BBC Radio Humberside.

QUOTE OF THE DAY III

"They've got to do better" - new QPR manager 'Arry Redknapp explains exactly what it is he thinks his players need to do to extricate themselves from the Premier League relegation mire.

QUOTE OF THE DAY IV

FIVER LETTERS

"No more discussions about Championship or Football Manager. Please" - Thomas Mogford.

"In Friday's Fiver Letters, Jim Hearson disputed Vugar Huseynzade's claim of being a fan of Football Manager since 2002 by mentioning the game only came into being in 2005. Jim is failing to consider the original Football Manager, created by Kevin Toms in 1982, which Vugar may well have started playing in 2002 using a ZX Spectrum emulator" - Nick Plain.

"I wonder if Ailsa from Home & Away will play Football Manager 2013 now he has been sacked by QPR and has a bit of spare time on his hands. Perhaps the Fiver can send him one of the copies you haven't bothered sending to your letter of the day winners in recent weeks to cheer him up. Football Manager 2013 and a £3m pay off from QPR should make his Christmas" - Dion Di Miceli.

"Re: Gareth Evans's query about how long it will be before we see a Fiver reader getting a job as an English teacher based on their solid, if unspectacular, history of having letters published in the Fiver (Friday's Fiver Letters). As an English teacher and Fiver reader, I would say a solid career of having pedantic, inane, and statistically dubious letters published would mark the writer out for a deputy headship at the very least. These are clearly the hallmarks of educational management" - Matt Gambrill.

"Re: Sir Alex Ferguson's statue outside Old Trafford. It was good of Mike Summerbee to sit for the scupltor. I expect that Lord Ferg was too busy. But it is a good likeness - of Summerbee that is" - Simon Oxley.

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BITS AND BOBS

The Brazil 2014 mascot has been revealed as a blue and yellow armadillo named Fuleco, prompting howls of outrage from people with too much time on their hands, who are currently wasting company time drawing up A4-sized protest "banners" on their office computers, which they'll print off and wave to little effect once everybody else has gone home this evening.

Expect to hear Everton goalkeeper Tim Howard muttering unconvincingly about competition for places being healthy, now that David Moyes is lining up a move for knack-prone free agent and former Sunderland goalkeeper Craig Gordon.

Dinamo Zagreb sporting director Zoran Mamic has said that if Manchester City want to sign 16-year-old Croatian wonderboy Alen Halilovic, they'll have to pay more than the fee of £9m being reported in the British press. "For that kind of money we wouldn't even sell his left leg," harrumphed Mamic.

And Carlos Tevez has been put off the road for a speeding-related matter less than a fortnight after his Porsche Panamera was impounded by police because the Manchester City striker could not produce a full UK driving licence.

STILL WANT MORE?

Paolo Bandini knows so much about Italian football that if you opened his skull and peeked inside, you'd see James Richardson sitting at a table drinking cappuccino, while Pippo Inzaghi and Paul Gascoigne drove by on flaming mopeds. Here's his Serie A round-up.

Sid Lowe knows so much about Spanish football that if you opened his skull and peeked inside, you'd see Emilio Butragueno and Andoni Zubizarreta sitting down to dinner at 2am, while Miguel Angel Nadal provided a tranquil soundtrack on classical guitar. Here's his La Liga round-up.

Raphael Hongistein knows so much about German football that if you opened his skull and peeked inside, you'd see a miniature Andy Brehme looking bored, sitting against a goal-post and flicking playing cards into an upturned Tyrolean hat. Here's his Bundesliga round-up.

And the weekend's Premier League action threw up a number of talking points, which is just as well, otherwise this article entitled Premier League Talking Points would look a bit threadbare.